Fully furnished for success

With blackbee for Home and Living online stores, multichannel retailers and brands

A once cosy market niche gets rough

The grounds are shifting: For a long time, Home and Living has been a cosy little niche in the online market. But last year, business was picking up rapidly. And with market size going through the roof, the rules are changing. A growing number of retailers and manufacturers are joining in, pursuing ambitious growth plans. Customers are getting more savvy and increasingly compare prices, terms and conditions and product features. They love to visit brick and mortar stores for testing, then go home and shop online.

In this situation, retailers and manufacturers can only stay competitive if they have access to the best data available on the market for Home and Living. Every day, they need valid answers to questions such as: Who are my competitors? What products are they offering? How similar are their products and assortments to mine? What prices do they ask, and when? How do their assortments change? Are they running sales promotions? What are customers saying? But for most, perfect market overview is just a dream, because they find it too difficult to properly identify and compare products on the internet.

Solid ground for pricing and product strategies

blackbee puts e-commerce on solid ground. Retailers and manufacturers of Home and Living products have access to all the information they need to survive and thrive in the online market. More precise than similar market intelligence software, blackbee shows them their competitive position and their options to increase margin or market share. blackbee’s unique, advanced matching technology makes all the difference. It does not depend on EAN or other numbering systems in order to properly identify and compare product items. And it easily scales with the most ambitious growth strategies.

Online Pure Player for Home and Cooking products boosts sales margins

A nightmare before X-mas

Christmas was approaching, when our client realized he was not prepared for the price wars that were sure to set in on the internet. It’s the time of the year when business peaks for Home and Cooking stores. The company is an online pure player. It needed to make sure it made a sound profit from Christmas sales. But it could not get a proper picture of the competitive situation. Trying to extract reliable and valid data from the market manually had proved to be futile. Prices, product items and assortments were too difficult to identify. So the company went looking for a suitable market intelligence tool.

blackbee to the rescue

blackbee fit the requirements perfectly. The online store had a profitable christmas season. Key success factors were blackbee’s extraordinary high data quality, and a pricing tool that effectively combines usability and customizability. Digging into the data, the specialist for Home and Cooking also learned that until then it had systematically set its price level to low. There actually was much room for price increases without losing business. This way, the data collected and analyzed by blackbee translated directly into better margins and more profits.